The NCAA on Monday morning took a stand for, as president Mark Emmert put it, “maintaining the appropriate balance of our values,’’ so that “programs and individuals do not overwhelm the values of higher education.’’

In order to achieve that, Emmert and the NCAA draped itself in powers more recognizable to a professional sports league—the president of the governing body for intercollegiate sports as commissioner, backed by university presidents acting as team owners.

Chew on that irony for a few minutes.

Then, chew on this: The NCAA as we once knew it may be no more.

Every aspect of the way it went about imposing punishment on the Penn State football program was almost the exact opposite of how it has handled its business any time before. The hint in advance that their reaction to the Jerry Sandusky child-abuse scandal would be “unprecedented”—what an understatement.

Roger Goodell and David Stern would be proud of Emmert. Why not? For all intents and purposes, he’s one of them now.

What remains to be seen, though, is whether this is the right direction in which the NCAA should turn—whether the path to reform in college sports goes through, essentially, an imperial presidency.

Part of that question: Is it worse than the way it did things before? It’s hard to imagine it being worse, as borderline-unconstitutional as it has become lately, even more so than it historically has been.

This was an organization that defined itself as the governing body of college sports, charged with securing the best interests of the so-called “student-athletes,’’ yet protected nobody’s interests except its own, at the expense of those very students and athletes.

Nobody is more to blame for the foulness at Penn State than Sandusky. But the thread of accountability goes straight to the top. Not just to the top of the football program (Joe Paterno, whose coaching-wins record was gutted posthumously by the sanctions), or the athletic department (Tim Curley) or the school (Graham Spanier).

It goes to the top of the institution that enabled football to get so enormous in relation to the rest of the school, covering up multiple felonies to protect it was accepted and embraced.

The NCAA helped make this mess.

It owed it to everybody to clean it up.

The only way to clean it up, then, was to throw out the convoluted, illogical, unjust, unsupportable rulebook and the precedents set on its behalf, and lay down a new framework for governing it all.

Granted, the NCAA has no moral leg to stand on with this. At the same time, it has a history of making up rules and rulings to fit its agenda. Worse of all, the presidents who run the NCAA had the gall to stand in judgment of the creation of one of their own, someone whom they had elevated to a position of authority nearly as high as the one he held at Penn State—Spanier, a former chair of the board of directors and member of the executive committee, the two groups that gave Emmert this power to lay down the law.

But for a second, let’s give Emmert and the presidents the benefit of the doubt.

The overwhelmingly heinous nature of what went on at Penn State might very well have slapped some sense of decency, fairness and responsibility into them. It hit them right between the eyes, and when their heads cleared, they might have seen the light: We can’t let this happen again.

Under the NCAA as it usually conducts itself, it had no legitimate place in this scandal; this is above and beyond the usual pursuit of athletes receiving “improper benefits” like tattoos, taking no-show jobs and selling bowl jerseys.

On its watch, while demonizing the very concept of athletes sharing the wealth football generates, the NCAA allowed coaches to be elevated to icons, and the highest officials at the schools to become servile to those coaches.

If the entire system isn’t torn down and rebuilt from the ground up, though, the best course for change is for the NCAA to fundamentally change the way it works. Cutting through the maze of self-serving factions and having one person—with a conscience, preferably—oversee it all is far from the worst solution.

It has to stop acting like the NCAA. Act like the NFL or NBA? Not necessarily, but close. If nothing else, they’d come a little cleaner about being a billion-dollar business instead of a not-for-profit educational entity.

Look at the manner in which Emmert and the presidents threw precedent out, hit Penn State hard in the wallet and in the very legacies and entitlements that embodied the corrupt culture, and got Penn State to sign off on it. No investigative procedure, no committee on infractions, no due process.

It’s a singular response to an extraordinary circumstance.

It also should be the new model for cleaning up the rot in the system.

To worry about how future schools will be handled next time they set up phony classes for players or sneak cars to recruits, is to miss the point. Those are just symptoms. The disease is so severe, extreme cures are necessary.

Emmert himself might not be the cure. But if college sports is serious about ensuring that there will never again be a fertile place on a college campus for a Sandusky, Paterno or Spanier to grow like a poisonous weed, then one powerful, unilateral voice can get them there.

If that voice is dedicated to balancing those values Emmert spoke about, then that promise can actually be fulfilled.